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65
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
64/100Critics
65/100Scholars
Author:
William R. Cross
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
April 12, 2022
William R. Cross chronicles the life story of the great painter and illustrator Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who captured America in the crucible of the Civil War and contributed to shaping American identity to this day. Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist's probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved and adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world.
What The Reviewers Say
[Homer's] reticence would seem to pose a challenge for the biographer, but in William R. Cross’s new—and certain to be definitive—life of the artist, the gaps in the painter’s private history are filled in by detailed accounts of people he knew and places he visited.
Cross’s scrupulous new book is devoted to Homer as both man and artist and is largely a pleasure to read, despite the inevitable difficulties of the subject: call him repressed; call him, as Cross does, 'a misfit by nature' or even a 'human periscope,' who liked to observe others without being seen. Cross tries to circumvent these difficulties by placing the life in a wider context, particularly in Homer’s early years.
Cross’s book...is a hefty, traditional 'life of.' Not particularly interested in investigating systemic power and privilege, Cross draws out aspects of life that may have figured more consciously in Homer’s own mind, acknowledging without contempt, for instance, Homer’s pragmatic approach to business.
William R. Cross...demonstrates that Homer emerged as a storyteller of enormous power and subtlety in a period — the 1860s — when America was casting around for the right story to tell about itself.
